When Rosemarie Truman told us we were one of the Breast Cancer Startup Challenge winners, we were thrilled to further develop and commercialize a novel technology that will potentially help save thousands of lives. Is this what we have been doing the first month? – Not even close. Step 1: “Should we buy our domain www.heragen.com today?” – Naveen, my co-founder, asked me a day before we incorporated. After thinking about it, I replied, “No. If nobody has bought it yet, it will be available tomorrow and we can buy it through the company.” Of course the next day we found out somebody had bought the domain and they were now selling it for $850 (it was $10 the day before). This was the start of our entrepreneurial odyssey. During the first month, we bought expensive domains, talked to lawyers, chose a company name, created a logo, and started to build a website. We learned really quickly that we need to prioritize and manage time effectively. Also, we cannot expect to start working on the actual product immediately. There are many steps before starting, but every journey begins with the first step – buying the domain while it’s still cheap! What I also learned during this first month is that many people are genuinely excited to help you - whether colleagues, friends, family, or somebody introduced to us, we have had the pleasure of working with many passionate and driven people that have given us advice and helped us along the way. I believe fostering startups is a core value of the Bay Area culture. The road is still long and full of unforeseen obstacles so stay tuned for our next steps towards the finish line.Gerardo Ramirez Co-founder @ Heragen gramirez@heragen.com